Thermal analysis of a heat and power plant with a high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactor is presented. The main aim of the considered system is to supply a technological process with the heat at suitably high temperature level. The considered unit is also used to produce electricity. The high temperature helium cooled nuclear reactor is the primary heat source in the system, which consists of: the reactor cooling cycle, the steam cycle and the gas heat pump cycle. Helium used as a carrier in the first cycle (classic Brayton cycle), which includes the reactor, delivers heat in a steam generator to produce superheated steam with required parameters of the intermediate cycle. The intermediate cycle is provided to transport energy from the reactor installation to the process installation requiring a high temperature heat. The distance between reactor and the process installation is assumed short and negligable, or alternatively equal to 1 km in the analysis. The system is also equipped with a high temperature argon heat pump to obtain the temperature level of a heat carrier required by a high temperature process. Thus, the steam of the intermediate cycle supplies a lower heat exchanger of the heat pump, a process heat exchanger at the medium temperature level and a classical steam turbine system (Rankine cycle). The main purpose of the research was to evaluate the effectiveness of the system considered and to assess whether such a three cycle cogeneration system is reasonable. Multivariant calculations have been carried out employing the developed mathematical model. The results have been presented in a form of the energy efficiency and exergy efficiency of the system as a function of the temperature drop in the high temperature process heat exchanger and the reactor pressure.

A lumped parameter type code, called HEPCAL, has been worked out in the Institute of Thermal Technology of the Silesian University of Technology for simulations of a pressurized water reactor containment transient response to a loss-of-coolant accident. The HEPCAL code has been already verified and validated against available experimental data, which in fact have been taken from separate effect tests mainly. This work is devoted to validation of the latest version of the HEPCAL code against experimental data from more complex tests. These experiments have been performed on three different test rigs (called TOSQAN,MISTRA and ThAI) and a part of them became the basis of the International Standard Problem No. 47 (ISP-47) dedicated to containment thermal-hydraulics. Selected experiments realized within the framework of the ISP-47 project have been simulated using the HEPCAL-AD code. The obtained results allowed for drawing of some important conclusions concerning heat and mass transfer models (especially steam condensation), two-phase flow model and buoyancy effects.

Passive autocatalytic recombiners (PAR) is the only used method for hydrogen removal from the containment buildings in modern nuclear reactors. Numerical models of such devices, based on the CFD approach, are the subject of this paper. The models may be coupled with two types of computer codes: the lumped parameter codes, and the computational fluid dynamics codes. This work deals with 2D numerical model of PAR and its validation. Gaseous hydrogen may be generated in water nuclear reactor systems in a course of a severe accident with core overheating. Therefore, a risk of its uncontrolled combustion appears which may be destructive to the containment structure.